BETWEEN THE LINES

Who busted the bankers of HSBC?

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union.

The international press is having a field day reporting on crooked banks and calling for nationalization of financial institutions.

But not one of these press reports bothered to mention the enormous risks taken by the news agency that actually broke the news about HSBC’s money-laundering schemes.

Beginning early in 2012, utilizing a courageous whistleblower who worked inside the institution for years, WND laid out the whole sordid mess involving these banksters without so much a mention in the rest of the press for six months.

Here’s a chronology of the WND investigative reports that brought this scandal to the attention of the public:

“Banking giant accused of laundering billions”: In this report by WND senior staff writer Jerome Corsi Feb . 1, it was first revealed that a former employee of HSBC in New York delivered to WND some 1,000 pages of customer account records he claimed were evidence of an international money-laundering scheme involving hundreds of billions of dollars by the global banking giant. John Cruz pulled the documents from the HSBC computer system before he was fired. Cruz was terminated Feb. 17, 2010, after two years at HSBC for “poor performance,” but he contends he was let go because senior management didn’t want to him to pursue his personal investigation.

It was at that moment HSBC began to retaliate against WND for its reporting. The company lodged a complaint that blocked access to a WND story reporting the whistleblower’s charge that the London-based corporation has engaged in a massive international money-laundering scheme. The story – “PayPal, American Express implicated in bank fraud” – included redacted images of customer account statements HSBC claimed was an illegal disclosure of personally identifiable information. No personal information was visible in the images, however. HSBC filed the complaint Feb. 9 with a WND Internet service provider, EdgeCast Networks. Access to the article was blocked, but the Internet provider restored access after three hours when an investigation concluded the complaint was unwarranted. HSBC never contacted WND about its complaint with the story. As I said back then, “I’ve been in journalism for 30 years and in Internet journalism for 15 years. In all that time I have never seen such a blatant and temporarily effective effort at raw censorship by a powerful institution – in this case, one of the world’s largest banks.” But that was just the beginning of the retribution.

Undeterred by the intimidation, WND continued its series. Making fraudulent loans to corporate accounts that existed in name only was a key part of the alleged money-laundering scheme by HSBC, according to the whistleblower. The evidence includes customer account ledgers for dozens of companies through which the financial institution was laundering money each month, charged Cruz, a former relationship manager for the bank’s southern New York region. Still, no other news agency in the world showed any interest.

The other shoe dropped when Corsi was fired by another investment firm for his investigative reports into HSBC. Along with his well-known WND reporting and book-writing, Corsi had served as a senior managing director since 2010 at Gilford Securities, a Manhattan investment firm that serves institutional and retail clients. Corsi said Gilford notified him that it would file a U-5 form with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, to de-register him from the firm due to “corporate reorganization.” Gilford Securities declined comment to WND.

Yet the national and international press has not made a single mention of the groundbreaking work of investigative reporter Jerome Corsi, twice a No. 1 New York Times best-selling author, in the HSBC affair.

He was right about HSBC.

Could it be these press outlets and government officials don’t want to mention Corsi’s role in the fall of HSBC because of his long-standing association with the Barack Obama identity story?

Where was the rest of the entire press establishment when Corsi, whom many of these entities demeaned as a “conspiracy theorist,” was presenting documented evidence of widespread banking fraud?

Where were the defenders of the First Amendment when WND was under attack by Europe’s biggest bank and one of the largest financial institutions in the world?

Let’s face it: It was WND and Jerome Corsi who busted the banksters of HSBC.

Nevertheless, the state-run media’s blackout continues.

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